Tories Pledge a £10bn “Britannia Shield” Air Defence System
The Conservatives will promise a layered national air defence of radar, command and control, and interceptor missiles, at £10 billion over ten years. James Cartlidge sets it out today as “the most significant upgrade to UK air defence for generations”. Kemi Badenoch said that “if a missile or drone is launched at Britain, we do not get a second chance to wish we had prepared”.
A billion a year is the number to hold on to, because the arguments about it are all arguments about scale. The government has already committed around £790 million to integrated air and missile defence in its investment plan, plus more than £350 million to double the Army’s Sky Sabre batteries, so the Conservative offer is larger but not transformative — and Israel’s Iron Dome, the obvious comparison, defends a country roughly a twelfth the size of Great Britain against short-range rockets. Britain owns no Patriot batteries and in an acute crisis would lean on Type 45 destroyers. The threat case is real enough: a Russian drone found at Leipzig airport in August, Iranian-proxy drones striking the RAF base in Cyprus, Iranian missiles fired at the Chagos Islands this year with American interceptors doing the work, and a defence committee that reported last November that the UK has “next to nothing”. Wes Streeting called the record “abysmal” and said the party had cut the Army to its smallest since Napoleon and left a £17 billion hole in the equipment plan. The Liberal Democrats’ James MacCleary called it “Truss-style fantasy economics” and asked which parts of the country the “Patchwork Dome” would not cover. It would be funded inside the existing 3% of GDP pledge, from welfare reform; spending is about 2.6% now. Watch Mr Cartlidge’s text for a costed coverage map.